It’s here! Windows Internet Explorer 9 is officially out of RC and into official RTM release!
Below is a video of my initial impressions about the browser.
The good: IE9 is great as far as IE goes. Definitely better than IE8, has great features where it counts.
The bad: New tracking options a bit too complicated, Private Browsing still complicated to get to, hiding the zoom controls/status bar by default is dumb but fortunately can be brought back (seen in video).
Also, as state in the video, even if you’re the biggest IE hater in the world, this is the first IE in a very long time that’s actually good and won’t tick you off. 
Yes, really. See video below for details.
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IE 9 definitely is a step forward, but it won’t change my mind about IE in general. I still rather use Firefox.
Very nice review Rich
I’m not sure I like the tabs to the right of the address bar, but it’s great that you can easily change that. I think it’s crazy that non-Microsoft websites in this day and age would even require only Internet Explorer to work correctly and I hate when I come across them. I believe those sites should at least make some effort to also support Firefox due to it’s platform independence and its wide use.
I’m not impressed with IE9 at all. Sure it looks cleaner and is faster than IE8 (that’s not saying much) but I still prefer the other browser options out there. Hopefully one of these days Ms will release an IE that doesn’t feel and act so much like IE.
In Chrome when you open Bookmark Manager it opens in a new tab. You cannot pin it to one side or another though but it does stay open in that tab
Hey Rich, good review.
One thing that you mentioned was the “red X” for deleting history from the address bar. That feature is available in IE8 as well and functioned in the same way. Another thing I wish MS would do is allow you to uninstall browser add-ons from in the manage add-ons list. It only allows you to disable or enable them. Some of them can be “force installed” with freeware and usually have no uninstaller for it. One feature I thought was cool in the RC version of IE9 ( I know this is for the RTM version but I haven’t installed that one yet) is the browser add-on performance monitor. If an add-on is taking a long time to load or is dragging down the speed of IE9, a yellow message alert box will popup at the bottom and give you the option of disabling the offending add-on(s). You could even set alert threshholds so if any add-on was taking longer that say .5 second to load you would get the alert. One thing I didn’t like about the RC is they relocated the download file yellow bar to the bottom. I guess I was just used to it being at the top and it threw me off a little. Overall, IE9 has a nice look and feel to it and I will be upgrading to it soon. It’s kinda funny how the “browser wars” have forced the coders to squeeze out more features in new versions just to stay competitive instead of just giving them a facelift.
DOS_equis
The way IE does add-ons has never been that great. Supposedly (keyword there), what you’re supposed to do to uninstall add-ons is do that from Add/Remove and not from the browser itself; something I’ve always found really annoying. And sometimes it doesn’t work.
The performance thing you’re talking about is “Performance Advisor”. How to use manually is here: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie9-windows_7/ie-9-add-on-performance-advisor/7bfb89d0-904e-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5
Yeah some of the annoying ones are written in a way so you can’t fully uninstall or successfully disable it all without breaking something else. I think ASK toolbar is one of them, which is slipped in on freeware all of the time. Thanks for the link. I will be running IE9 soon so I wiil get to play around with the final release a bit more in the near future.
DOS_equis